This invention relates to entertainment devices and methods.
In shops, sports events and for other organised social gatherings, in general one or more representatives of the shop or the organising entity are available in person, thereby allowing an attendee to ask for help, make a purchase or alert someone to a problem.
In a similar fashion, in the fields of on-line social networks such as MySpace® or Bebo®, or online commercial retailing, such as Amazon® or Ebay®, users interact with the organising entity via a web interface. This interface is either made available at the root of the entity's web address or is imposed upon each web page in the form of a titlebar or sidebar comprising links to relevant pages, such as ‘frequently asked questions’ or a site map. However, such an approach is both impersonal and inflexible, and so commonly such links also provide access to email facilities, a phone number by which they can contact a representative of the entity directly, thereby satisfying the requirement for flexible interaction found in their real-life counterparts.
Whilst jumping to new web pages or leaving the computer altogether to make a phone call may be an acceptable solution for a web environment, in a virtual 3D environment such as an on-line game world, users do not want to leave their current location in order to interact with a supervising entity; rather, they would prefer that this entity is represented directly within the virtual environment with them, as this is a natural form of interaction experienced in-real life.
However, for massively multiplayer online games where there may be tens of thousands of users (each represented on-line by an avatar, typically a human-like graphic character), all dispersed over many disparate areas of a game world possibly including multiple quasi-identical instances of virtual environments, providing such direct representation within the game would be prohibitively costly in terms of human resources.